With that in mind, there are a few free video editors available in the land of Internet, and although they aren’t entirely useful for heavy editing, they are good for small projects or learning the basics before you make a major purchase. Take a gander at MPEG Streamclip, a basic clip-trimmer and and video converter that is simple yet effective.

Instead of trimming clips within your standard editor, you could first sort through them using MPEG Streamclip and pick out only the ones that you want. After this, just pop the clips in a folder and choose what you want to use. This beats throwing in a clip from a video that is half an hour long.

Besides splicing the footage, you could always just use Streamclip to pull a piece of footage from a long video that you shot. A good example of this could be a hidden camera prank video which normally takes a long time to shoot. This makes Streamclip ideal for basic YouTube videos or for quick and easy editing. One thing that comes to mind is vlogging which is normally pretty sporadic.

Convert Files However Needed

On top of the extremely primitive editing system included in MPEG Streamclip (and primitive is how I like it in some cases), the app offers the ability to convert files as needed. Just by clicking File on the menu, you will be presented with a variety of formats that your video can be exported in. Below is a list of some of the formats offered.

Beyond these, the converter will also allow you to export only audio if this is what you happen to desire. I’d assume that this would be decent if your camera has a decent microphone and you have recorded an acoustic performance. After that, you could very well pop the track right onto your iPod or iPhone.

Conclusion

So there you have it – an incredibly basic editing tool for any simple videos that you may have in mind. MPEG Streamclip is relatively easy to use, but there are a few extra heavier video and audio options for those of you that want to dive a little deeper down the rabbit-hole.

What other simple editors have you ever used? Do you know of any similar video converters?

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Alek Davis

September 21, 2011 at 6:06 pm

I did not quite get the benefit of using Streamclip to trim videos for later use in more advanced video editors (such as Adobe Premiere, or Windows Movie Maker) vs trimming them in the said editors in the first place. I think I tried most free video converters and for simple tasks (like trimming and converting to different formats), I prefer Format Factory. For more advanced tasks, I used Windows Movie Maker, and recently started using Adobe Premiere Elements (not free).

It wouldn't be very useful with Adobe Premiere, but I would hardly call Windows Movie Maker an advanced video editor. On actual advanced video editors (such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5 – my personal editor – and Final Cut Pro 7), you can trim the video files down in a separate module before dropping them into the timeline.

It's a lot easier to do so and much better in the long run, so that's what I was trying to draw a comparison from. However, the con of this is not using it in the same system, which will always be easier in the first place. On the other hand, let's say you have an incredibly long video with oh... let's say 50 shots.

Using Streamclip, you could go through the entire file, cut out each shot, label them as something (such as "ShotOfFlowers_1" or "ShotOfPeopleTalking_5", and this will be much more organized. This brings the power of an advanced editor into something that is free, or in your case, not free. However, with video capture, Adobe Premiere Elements may divide the shots for you if you use Scene Detect. I used Premiere Elements for a few years before moving to Pro.